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Democracy Player is 0.9.2 and Growing Up Fast
Dean writes "Democracy Player, the open source answer for RSS video aggregation/playback, has just made it to 0.9.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you haven't tried Democracy Player for a while, it's time to try it again. The application is more responsive and stable, uses less memory, integrates Bittorrent, and can now play Flash videos (including stuff from YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc). Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources." In many ways, Democracy is the template of what I'd like to see out of Apple's upcoming iTV. Although my guess is that it will be more like MythTV- only for people willing to put in the effort.
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
For many many services the ideal number of people is just above the critical mass level of committed/dedicated users who will put in the time and effort to make things work and just below the level at which it get's noticed by the wrong people. Making it difficult to use (but powerful and flexible - features that are attractive to the dedicated people who add the most value) is a reasonable strategy for community based systems.
Beep beep.
I tried it out. I quickly noticed it was using XUL. XUL apps, like Firefox and Thunderbird, *each* consume large amounts of my computer's memory. They need to come up with a shared, one time loaded XUL library for XUL apps.
emerge -s democracy
;)
Searching...
[ Results for search key : democracy ]
[ Applications found : 0 ]
So it's not for me yet (or maybe rather, my interest in this is too little for me to install it around portage)
Too bad, maybe another time
What the hell is the comment about iTV in there for? iTV is hardware for viewing video, Democracy is software for finding/downloading it. I don't know how they will be comparable at all. Furthermore, Apple's track record is precisely one of making easy to use systems. The idea that it would require anything like the effort needed for MythTV is pretty out of line. More likely it will be like the iTunes store. Easy to use, but limited. (If we must compare, MythTV is more of a challenge to use, but far less limited)
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources.
;)
You use any number of the video downloading apps available for Firefox, save it as a real video format, and watch it that way -- then, regardless of what device you watch it on (mobile or otherwise) you can still use it.
Personally, I prefer it that way, but that's true Democracy
But, but, no one will ever need more than 640K.
I just installed a copy of Democracy. It offered to install SIX codecs for my QuickTime installation. While that's great and all, how many of those are free?
I saw in the list some freebies like FLAC, but I also saw "flash." IIRC, the flash codec was only available to those who purchased Flash Pro.
Am I right?
ZoneAlarm wants to know if "Mozilla" Democracy.exe may access the trusted zone...
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
USENET represents the closest venue we have for true and complete freedom of expression. People can post about virtually any idea, concept, thought or belief. They can transmit image and video data. In short, it's the freest place we have. And as a result, there will be stuff there that boils your blood, and makes you want to shit your pants. That's what freedom of expression is all about. It's about seeing spam, viewing pictures of Goatse's gaping anus, and reading about how the TCO of Windows is less than that of Linux. And as much as we may hate such ideas, we have to be thankful that we have the freedom to read them, and somebody else had the freedom to post them.
Thanks for enumerating as to why Linux will never be for the masses (the wrong 'type' of people). Now we know it's intentional.
The page says it is 'open-source' and there is a 'source code' browsing link, but it never seems to load anything. If it is truely open source, how about making the code accessible in say, a tarball? And what is the source license? It doesn't say on the main page...
It seems to me this 'Participatory Culture Foundation' (which I can't say I've never heard of before now) is being a little cagy.
apt-get install democracyplayer
installed the latest version. Debian package version 0.9.2.1-1
Maybe you should try something a bit more cutting-edge?
The article and the home page say "Democracy Player 0.9.2 Released!" but on the download page it says
"Download Now Version: 0.9.2 (Beta)".
Sent from my desktop computer
The profit motive both fuels and inhibits innovation, and Apple is driven by the profit motive. http://malfy.org/
The benefit of Democracy is that it saves bandwidth for the producers given that it uses bittorrent. Also, it offers channels via RSS, such as a particular show that you like, so if something new comes down the RSS feed, Democracy can automatically download it and add it to your media library. Once it puts the video file on your computer, you can reencode it to other formats if you like.
If you haven't tried Democracy Player for a while,
Does this include "ever"?
The thing I don't like about democracy is it will download content with formats that it doesn't know how to play, which completely defeats the point of it, forcing you to use an external player anyway. mplayer plays them (everything) fine, so I don't think it's a codec issue.
The other issue is content. After spending about an hour searching for and downloading content I didn't end up with anything that I thought was particularly worthwhile. A replacement for TV it is far from...
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I installed it, ran it, and boom, out go the lights, windows crashed spectaculerly, requiring two restarts to work properly again.
Not the best example of stability I've seen.
Playing a video in Democracy in FC6 does not work...
Nothing useful in the FAQ.
Nothing useful in the console output
rpm -e Democracy
I just built Democracy Player for SLED10 for my SLED RPMs page. This is the first time I got to try out Democracy Player and all I can say is CHECK IT OUT! Couple this along with the DeVeDe Utility and you got an excellent way to get some really cool shows on DVD that you normally wouldn't be able to get.
Democracy Player just happens to be the best interface for Google Video and YouTube to boot.
Get it for SLED10 at http://www.pcc-services.com/sled10_rpms.html.
Tried posting in the forum to no avail, but I thought Slashdot might have an idea somewhere in its collective mind!
Anyone know how I can get this to work from behind a proxy on Ubuntu 6.10? It has no proxy settings of its own and seems to ignore the system proxy. I'm looking for some way to redirect its traffic through the proxy.
Two questions, from someone who tried it a couple months back and thought it sucked: can it handle any interesting codecs yet (*cough*XViD*cough*) and does the BT client not totally suck anymore? I found that anything I actually wanted to watch had to be opened in VLC, and the BT performance was worse even than the reference client, never mind Azureus.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Just by choosing that name, they have blocked themselves away from the largest market today - China.
I just reinstalled Kubuntu 6.10 yesterday, and so this morning, seeing this article, I decided to install Democracy.
So far it looks pretty nice, but if I try to view any feeds, I get an error telling me that the PSM is not installed (despite the fact I did install that package) and then it freezes and I have to kill the process.
Looks promising, but I can't really do anything with it til I find out about this problem, and I don't know where to look.
Sounds more like communism to me :)
What I want is a mode for Democracy to load, grab the fresh content to a folder of my desire and then close without opening a gui window. That would be an incredible addition to most HTPC's and give us the step closer to net TV everyone is foaming at the mouth over.
Yes, I could install lots of crap on windows to allow me to run bashpodder, but why?
(I dont use MythTV because it's nowhere near as good or easy to use as Mediaportal. so I'm stuck with a windows HTPC until the guys at MYthTV decide to work on ease of use and configurability)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I gave this a try, thinking "This might be useful for me to keep up with my anime". However, it's still got a way to go before I will use this app. Here's what's stopping me.
1) My Content: You can select a directory that contains video content that you already have on your machine during configuration. But you only get to select one directory. After you select that directory, you don't seem to be able to change it.
2)I added animesuki to the "channels". This downloaded the RSS feed and set up roughly 1600 "programs". However it is set by default to start downloading *all* of them. After scrambling around I stopped them. This is a BAD default.
3)As far as I can tell, I can't specify which "programs" on a "channel" I want to download. It's all or nothing. I want to input a regexp here (seems like an unlikely feature for this app, though...)
4)I tried to play 2 files that I already had downloaded (REC and Touch). REC crashed the Democracy player. Touch played audio for about 3 seconds before hanging. Both of these are AVI packages with Mpeg4 codecs...
So, while interesting, I think I'll wait until it's a bit more mature...
I say fuck organized religion in general. But what the hell does any of that have to do with Democracy player?
Seriously, it's like they see the word "Democracy" and think "Here's a place to release a big steaming troll turd."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Player
Did a bit of poking around and can't seem to find something. Looking for an app that will integrate as a Mythtv plug in that will download RSS feeds so that I can watch my video podcasts on the sofa.
Closest thing I can find is torrentocracy but it's more bittorrent geared (not totally a bad thing mind) and (worse) isn't compatible with any vaguely modern mythtv version.
Thoughts?
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
gee, I thought we were bigger than this racist shit. Hmmm, apparently not. Although, the scientologists do have to go.
PCF, which makes Democracy Player, is hiring developers:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/jobs/
Telecommuting is ok.
I suppose it's just a matter of what I'm used to, but I don't feel comfy in this app.
/wouldn't/ want to be playing a video fullscreen.
1) If you maximize the window, it covers the task bar. It has a fullscreen mode; why does it have to do this? Being able to see the task bar is one of the only reasons I
2) I've yet to find a way to close the channel guide on the left. It takes up valuable screen real estate.
3) In Media Player Classic, if you click on the video it stops of pauses. If you double click, it enters/exits fullscreen. I'm used to it.
That's just how I feel, in case anyone cares. I guess I'll stick with MPC, though I seriously hate how it steals input from the volume not on my keyboard away from Windows, making it change the video volume rather than system volume. Hate it, hate it.
Property is theft.
Great - they recommend uninstalling Java to use it.
Right. Brilliant.
How about going back to the drawing board and fixing the problem BEFORE releasing a crippled product? Ever occur to anybody on the project?
I hope this thing works better than Amarok which for no known or apparent reason just died on my Kubuntu. And Juk, which I tried as a replacement, wouldn't play anything at all. I'm back to using Kaffeine as my audio player as well as my video player.
Can anybody in the IT industry write code that actually works? Anybody? Anybody at all?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Linux is for the masses. Tivo is made with Linux.
Installing an OS is not for the masses, you need at least some knowledge about computers to do that. That is why computer vendors pre install the OS instead of just including the disk with the package and expecting the end user to do it.
I've been using Democracy 0.9.1 for a couple weeks now. It works great -- the videos play quite nicely, setting up a channel is relatively painless, the variety of codecs is good, etc.
My one problem is that Democracy allows connections on all kinds of ports that it supposedly doesn't. I have it set (in Preferences) to use only ports 8500 to 8600, but in reality, I get connections all over the place from ports 6000 to 60000. When I shut down Democracy, the connections stay in place. I think it's understandable that I don't want these connections!
Is this a problem with all Torrent programs? Is there anything I can do about it? Thanks to anyone who can help.
I installed it, never ever having used .rss stuff before.
Took me 15 minutes to figure out how to add youtube channels, and once I did, I get a whopping 15 videos per channel. Now because I probably dont know what I'm doing, I cant yet poo all over this, but why would I want to be limited by this? Why not just go to youtube.com and freely click around? Why bother with this program at all?
It seems to be a solution without a problem tbh.
I want a software based on open standards that integrates with any mobile video player and converts all the video it receives into the format that I can use. So for my 60GB iPog 5G that means: transcode all content in 640x480 h.264 after download please. Oh - and WiFi sync with my TV in the apropiate format as well while you are at it. Is this too much to ask?
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
A far better name would be Whiny Commie Demoncrat Terrorist Player
I can play all this stuff with VLC. Why bother with this crap?
or you could write your own code and bypass the MCSE script kiddies altogether..
YHBT, YHL, HAND. By the way, someone should fix you. The last thing we need is to see your offsprings. Let people believe in whatever they want, Islam is not a new thing. Force feeding them your "freedom" is stripping them from their freedom, freedom of belief. And don't talk about their "violent ways" when your hands are dripping blood. Take a quick glance at history some time if you don't know why they are pissed off. Ok, ok.. I forgot, don't feed the troll. P.S: It's not the thousands years history I'm talking about, it's the recent history.
Syllable 0.62 is here at last!!!
that's genuinely witty. not something you see everyday on slashdot. :p
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm not sure if this applies to this particular version. But I've been running what should be the latest release on my MacbookPro and have had problems with Democracy generating huge log files. One of the logs on my OSX system was 9 gigs. It seems when running Console that Democracy generates a lot of Console messages. Has anyone else ever had this problem? I've seen bug tickets on the net for this, but never any response to the situation....
Mersenne Electronic Music Lead Mentat,Ministry of Computation Team Abunai Dangerous Media for Dangerous Times